What is Hollaback?
The real motive of street harassment is
intimidation. To make its target scared or uncomfortable, and to make
the harasser feel powerful. But what if there was a simple way to take
that power away by exposing it? You can now use your smartphone to do
just that by documenting, mapping, and sharing incidents of street
harassment. Join an entire community ready to Hollaback!
Against torture in Egypt and inhuman treatment of Egyptians in their own country
"It's Khaled Said...
He is a 28 years old Egyptian who was tortured and killed by two policemen in the street where he lived in Alexandria, Egypt. Khaled's death further exposed the Egyptian police brutality and their systematic torture of Egyptians. Khaled died, but many Egyptians have become alive where his picture has now become the symbol of Egyptians' struggle for their rights and freedom."
The CAE Defense Fund was created in 2005 as a mechanism to raise funds
for legal bills incurred by Dr. Steven Kurtz and Dr. Robert Ferrell in
what its members argued was a politically motivated attack by the
Department of Justice - one which threatened the constitutional and
fundamental rights not only of the two defendants, but also of
everyone, due to legal precedents that would have been set by an
unfavorable outcome.
In response, thousands of people worldwide organized demonstrations and
raised money for the two men's legal defense through fundraisers and a
variety of other grassroots efforts.
www.caedefensefund.org
Introduction
By Andrew Boyd & Dave Oswald Mitchell
"The clowns are organizing. They are organizing. Over and out."
-Overheard on UK police radio during action
by Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, July 2004
To the Arts, Citizens: it's a fantastic title. Hearing it, anyone who's been involved in political activism will probably think: "At last we're getting somewhere." The idea that art is part of citizenship, that there is a democratic exercise of the arts within the framework of public life, and that this appeal to the citizen-artist can be supported by a major cultural institution, is about as progressive as you could get today. Especially since this is a direct echo of the French republican tradition, where the phrase, Aux armes citoyens, is nothing less than a call to rise up and institute democracy against tyranny ? in other words, a call to revolution. The Portuguese know the meaning of this revolutionary call to arms from decisive historical events that are still in living memory. So one can imagine that the organizers of this exhibition did not take their title lightly.
ReadWorking with new media in the part of South Asia that I come from is something like crossing a tightrope on a bicycle. The bicycle which could have helped me along were I on my way on flat ground makes the crossing that much more precarious. Consider the bicycle to be the single computer and the internet connection which I use along with at least seventeen other people, friends, colleagues, neighbours and complete strangers.
ReadTo talk about the Cybermohalla project is to talk about concrete practices and how they relate to forms of knowledge. This is essential when we reflect on being producers of knowledge. What we are trying to follow and understand is the intricate web of processes involved in the development of a group - not just an aggregate of specialised selves. We also try to follow how this group generates within it a capacity for self recognition, for intersubjective recognition, for understanding the social biography of the neighbourhood and for developing a sense of and addressing diverse publics.
ReadThere is a last enterprise that might be undertaken. It would be to seek experience at its source, or rather, above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience. (Bergson, 1991: 184).
ReadNext 5 Minutes is a festival that brings together media, art and politics. Next 5 Minutes revolves around the notion of tactical media, the fusion of art, politics and media. The festival is organised irregularly, when the urgency is felt to bring a new edition of the festival together.
ReadFriends,
At Zuccotti Park, there was always a bit of
social service involved in the occupation:-- homeless people sheltered,
the hungry fed -- but it was ancillary to Occupy's main objectives,
which dealt with societal, structural problems. But the reaction to
hurricane Sandy, and the formation of Occupy Sandy, brought out a
different aspect of the Occupy movement, not directed at Wall Street or
big systemic issues, but directly providing help to those in need.What
kind of role is that for Occupy? How does it fit in with Occupy Wall
Street's basic thrust?
Streaming media deliver video or audio content over the web. But streaming media are very different from the web. In the UK such formats force BT to breach the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Act. To the grass-roots activist web-critics, this might be the right (and most likely only) time to pull the plug and prune the web. Alternatively we could happily stream on and witness how independent media production will be pushed to the periphery of the new order. Here is one of many scenarios...
Does the art of campaigning involve commodifying a struggle and presenting it in a package to the people through the media? What impact does the media really have? How useful is the net as an alternative medium? Does it only reach the alternative people - those who already know about the issues or is it capable of engaging with the mainstream public. Does genuine public opinion have any real impact in the current political and corporate climate?
ReadA Salvage Operation:
Ontologies of the Drone
Amplifying Expertise
Sarai-Waag Workshop at Sarai-CSDS, Delhi March 3-5, 2003
"The hottest place in hell is reserved for those who tried to stay neutral in times of crisis..."
- The Inferno, Dante Alighieri
Our ability to move into a collectively imagined future has been trapped in an ever-present now, composed of continually transmitted images. The spectacle accompanies us throughout our lives. News, propaganda, advertising, entertainment and social media present a continuous stream of imagery, projecting a constant justification for how our culture is formulated. When Guy Debord first published The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, the digital revolution was still decades away and the technological capacity to project images into every corner of our lives was far less developed than it is today. The spectacle is no longer simply all of the time; it is also everywhere. More than ever before, Debord's words apply: "Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation."
ReadThe four-day conference on the campus of the Universidade Estadual de
Campinas (Unicamp) brought together many key persons from the tactical
media movement of Brazil and some of their counterparts in the
Brasilian government.
The movement is converging from roots in
free radio, free software, hardware hacking, art and social movements.
It is currently focussed around a large-scale project master-minded by
Claudio Prado and supported by the Ministry of Culture: ?Pontos de
Cultura? (Culture Spots) which is aiming to empower up to 600 cultural
projects with free software-based multimedia production and publication
facilities.
The third edition of the Next 5 Minutes revolved around four core themes:
- The Art of Campaiging
- The Post-Governmental Organisation (PGO)
- How Low Can You Go? The Technical and the Tactical
- Tactical Education
The formal political system today faces a new geography of power.
Globalization and the new technologies have contributed to the
shrinking of state authority and the explosion of a whole series of new
actors engaged in governance activities.
The current phase of the world economy is characterized by significant
discontinuities with the preceding periods and radically new
arrangements. This becomes particularly evident in the impact of
globalization on the geography of economic activity and on the
organization of political power. There is an incipient unbundling of
the exclusive authority over its territory we have long associated with
the nation-state.
Anyone involved with "tactical media" (TM) before its famed christening in 1996 at the Next Five Minutes had to know that naming this cultural/political tendency was going to have some very negative repercussions. The naming was the first step in doing what TM feared the most°Xclaiming cultural territory doomed to house haunting archives. Once given an official title, so many nasty processes could begin - most significantly, the construction of historical narratives. So many narratives already exist explaining this ephemeral, immediate, specific, and deterritorialized process of cultural production that seemed so urgent to so many radical subjects in the early 90s.